Trading Shots: Downes and Fowlkes on UFC Fight Pass' first big event

In this week’s Trading Shots, MMAjunkie columnist Ben Fowlkes teams up with retired UFC/WEC fighter Danny Downes for a look at what we’re getting for our money on Fight Pass now that it’s costing us $9.99 a month.

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Fowlkes: Maybe it’s just me, but with Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 37 event, it feels like we’ve crossed a threshold with this UFC Fight Pass thing. The free trial is over, the credit cards are being charged, and we finally saw what a real event (no offense to this past week’s event in Macau, but come on) is going to look and feel like on the UFC’s subscription-based streaming service.

My first two questions to you this week are: 1) Did you haul yourself to the laptop to watch this one live, and 2) Did you feel like it was worth your money?

Downes: I had some familial obligations yesterday, so I was unable to catch the majority of the stream live. I would sneak away every couple of minutes to watch the fights from my phone, though. Not sure how much it endeared me to my father-in-law, but I’m sure I’m always disappointing him anyway.

As far as the second question is concerned, I thought it was worth the money. In fairness, a Fight Pass subscription offers you more than these live events, but I think we would both agree that these events are the most attractive feature. I went back and watched the whole event later, and with the exception of the Melvin Guillard vs. Michael Johnson fight (the first round had its moments), all the bouts were solid. In the end, isn’t that all you want? Some of the time zone differences can mess up your schedule, but our friends in the Eastern Hemisphere have been dealing with that for years. When do we ever hear them complain? Actually, now that I think about it, forget that last question.

Fowlkes: I go back and forth on what the most attractive feature of Fight Pass is, or is supposed to be. At first I thought it would the ability to type in any fighter’s name and get instant access to all his UFC (or Strikeforce or Affliction or PRIDE or, if it comes to that, WFA) fights. Turns out that’s not really happening, either because there’s too much still missing from the fight library or because the search function just plain sucks.

In fairness, the keymasters of this system are pretty responsive to complaints. Two hours after I griped on Twitter about Jimi Manuwa’s fights not showing up in a search, that was fixed. Good work, Fight Pass. Now stop making me sift through old episodes of “Best of PRIDE” in order to find my favorite freak-show fights.

As for the live event aspect, it seems like what we have here is the invention of the $10 pay-per-view. Fans who resisted the early allure of Fight Pass were probably tempted to give in and give up the credit card digits in order to see this event, which featured by far the best lineup we’ve seen on Fight Pass so far and at the least inconvenient time for North American viewers. But will the promise of an incomplete fight library be enough to get them to stick around for the next one? With fight cards subject to a whole lot of change these days, why wouldn’t you just cancel at the end of the month and then wait to see what the next lineup looks like by the time it finally arrives? In other words, why wouldn’t you treat Fight Pass events like any other pay-per-view, and decide on a case-by-case basis whether they’re worth your money?

Downes: Ah, the mighty Ben Fowlkes, “Bringer of Revolution” to web-based subscription services. I suppose the constant subscription and cancellation cycle to optimize your dollars works in theory, but tell that to anyone who’s signed up for any contract. What about all those unread issues of The Economist you have lying around? It may not be fair to compare Fight Pass to things like MLB.tv or WWE Network, but they do appeal to a certain type of fan. I grew up cheering for the Chicago White Sox, and now that I live in California, I can’t watch many of their games. I’m not going to pay to watch them out of market, though, because I’m just not that big of a baseball fan.

In the same way, the average person may not be that interested in Fight Pass. If you catch an odd fight here or there, you probably think there are better ways to spend your money. I hate the term “real” fight fan, so let’s just say if you are an MMA enthusiast, Fight Pass is worth your time. Now, does that mean that we should be happy with everything because any MMA is better than none? No, but I don’t think we have a large enough sample size to make that determination. What would your ideal Fight Pass look like? Besides a full fight library, what should these live events be like? You don’t want them filled with “lesser” talent, or else we’ll feel shortchanged. But what if there were a Fight Pass card that looked like UFC 171? Wouldn’t that be just as problematic?

Fowlkes: It would be problematic only because we all know the UFC can’t sustain something like that. It doesn’t have enough marquee fighters. I doubt it even has enough to sustain the current quality level. Six months from now, you think there’s going to be someone of Alexander Gustafsson’s caliber on a Fight Pass card? With the difficulty the UFC has had in keeping its other events stocked with talent, that seems highly unlikely.

As far as what my ideal Fight Pass would look like, I have to admit that my podcast cohost Chad Dundas made a good point with his recent column on the subject. If Fight Pass wants to be a good deal for fight fans, it should save them money. It should cut them in on some sort of break, since simply signing up for something like this brands you as a hardcore fan. And what do hardcore fans get for their money? Right now they get access to old fights that they’ve probably already seen (they’re hardcore, remember?) and access to a third tier of new events that, as Old Man Dundas wrote, “used to be free or didn’t exist at all.”

That’s accurate. The best we can hope for from Fight Pass are events that aren’t quite as good as pay-per-views, but are roughly equivalent to FOX Sports 1 cards. They’re (again, at best) cable TV events that the UFC couldn’t get on cable TV. But hey, it doesn’t want to waste them, either. Someone should see them, and so the cost gets passed directly on to us, the hardcore fight fans. Seems like opting into that demographic should cut you a break somewhere down the line. If a Fight Pass subscription came with a discount on pay-per-views, you could ask me to pay significantly more for it and I’d still consider it a deal. I also wouldn’t bother wondering whether I should cancel now and renew the next time you have something good. It would result in me getting more for my money, rather than just giving the UFC more of it. Is that really such an insane request?

Downes: That’s actually one of the more reasonable requests you’ve made. I honestly don’t know what the future of Fight Pass holds. Will the UFC sweeten the deal to make Old Man Dundas sign up for it instead of wasting his money on hard butterscotch candies? I’m not sure, but I do know that the Fight Pass of today is better than the Fight Pass at launch.

I won’t discount the issues have fans have with Fight Pass specifically, but part of this has to do with the changing of media in general. For the longest time, newspapers used to have their content free on the website, and then they started putting up pay walls. With recent net neutrality developments, the way we consume the Internet itself could change. For many years it was relatively easy for fans to ingest 100 percent of UFC programming. Remember when you still got excited about a new episode of “The Ultimate Fighter” because it meant you could watch a fight on a weekday? Some fans may call them the “good ol’ days,” but they’re wrong – they were just the old days.

Not only do we have more fights to watch, we have better fighters competing. Whether we’re talking about Fight Pass or the amount of fight cards in general, a lot of this really breaks down to a crisis of abundance. Fight fans can be more discerning with their time and money, and that’s a good thing for everyone. Instead of thinking about how promoters are trying to think of different ways to steal our $9.99, we should think of all this as a form of empowerment. Fans now have a tool at their disposal that can command more respect than ever before. We may not wield the individual influence of a Ben Fowlkes, but with enough time, even Fight Pass subscribers can bring a little revolution.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Danny Downes, a retired UFC and WEC fighter, is an MMAjunkie contributor who also writes for UFC.com and UFC 360. Follow them on twitter at @benfowlkesMMA and @dannyboydownes.

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